Home From War, but Not at Peace

She left Afghanistan as a first lieutenant—and came home to her Florida desk job as a woman haunted by her experience. Let Lauren Kay Johnson, the winner of Glamour's ninth annual personal essay contest, tell you her story.

Editor's note: We've gotten tons of feedback on this story. For more from Lauren Kay Johnson, read her blog, UNcamouflaged.

Three years after coming home, "healing is a process I am still going through," says Johnson.

The waiting room is meant to be comfortable. Cushioned chairs line the walls. Gossip magazines cover a coffee table in a glossy patchwork. Air conditioning provides welcome relief from Florida's summer heat. But when I walk through the door of the Air Force base's mental health clinic, I am anything but comfortable.

There's been talk of changing the name to behavioral health clinic because of the belief that people with "mental health" issues don't belong on the front lines. A glance around confirms the stigma. There are five other airmen here, all with downcast eyes. I've never felt so exposed while wearing camouflage. You can't be anonymous with a name tag. Or an officer's rank. The silver lieutenant bars on my collar are supposed to mean I'm self-sufficient. Composed. Competent. Being here is as good as admitting I'm not.

The young airman behind the Plexiglas-fronted welcome desk checks me in for my appointment, typing anxiously at a computer, then squeezes a stack of paperwork through a hole in the window (who am I—Hannibal Lecter?). It's an eight-page "intake questionnaire," designed "to help your provider obtain a comprehensive picture of you in an effort to develop a treatment plan that will best suit your needs."

Treatment. Because I'm sick. Because there's something wrong with me that needs to be fixed. I take a seat closest to the door—in case I change my mind—and begin with question 1.

*Describe the primary concern that brought you here today.*I hesitate, trying to find a brief way to summarize the last year of my life. I scriblle "depression, anxiety." I can always expand later. After all, that's what this therapy thing is about, right?

What led to your decision to seek help at this time?

I want to write that I'm tired of pretending I'm OK. I can force my smile muscles to work against their will and insert myself into "normal" conversations. But it's exhausting. I write, "Seeking advice for dealing with stress and anxiety."

The form asks me how upsetting this concern is to me. On the right end of the scale, I check "very severe." It looks melodramatic. What do I have to be very severely upset about?

Approximately when did your problem begin?

That's a hard one.

I could say January 2009. That's when I volunteered for a nine-month deployment to rural Afghanistan.

It was a post eight years in the making: Naive at 18, conservative and patriotic, I'd accepted a Reserve Officers' Training Corps college scholarship a few months after 9/11. I commissioned as a lieutenant in 2006, when deployments were a reality for everyone—even me, with a relatively cushy desk job as an Air Force public affairs officer. In Afghanistan, I could have served for six months writing press releases at a large base with gourmet coffee stands and salsa-dancing lessons. Instead I volunteered for a longer assignment working with Afghan citizens; it would still be mostly a desk job, but I'd be documenting rebuilding efforts. I wanted to be hands-on; I wanted to witness the positive impact our troops were having on locals' lives.

Johnson in 2006, being sworn in by her mom, a retired lieutenant colonel who served as a nurse in the first Gulf War. (Photo: Lauren Kay Johnson)

I could also say April 2009, when I reported for training in Indiana. Three months of playing Army—crawling in the dirt, carrying weapons everywhere—is bound to take its toll on a city girl who grew up in Seattle and went to college in Los Angeles. But it was exhilarating; I was just anxious to get to Afghanistan. So no, the problem didn't start there.

Afghanistan: June 29, 2009. That could be the moment, when we stopped playing war and started living it. Deployment came with the expected long hours and drab meals of dry meat and soggy vegetables. What I didn't expect was the isolation. On a base less than a mile around, I was surrounded by hundreds of troops. But we existed in a bubble. We relied on unreliable Internet connectivity, less reliable phone service, and twice-weekly mail drops—if weather cooperated and security was sufficient. These were our only links to the outside world.

I didn't expect the paranoia, a certainty that not only could something happen but that it would. It was there every time I strapped on 60 pounds of body armor and climbed into an armored vehicle that might as well have been labeled in bright block letters: U.S. MILITARY CONVOY. AIM HERE. Wearing my bulletproof vest and helmet, carrying an M4 rifle and M9 pistol, with 225 rounds of ammunition strapped to my chest, I looked much tougher than I felt.

Sometimes I'd walk back to my barracks alone at night with only statistics of military sexual assault to keep me company. In a war zone your base is the one place you shouldn't need to worry about protection. But I knew the stories. I overheard vulgar talk at tables in the chow hall. So paranoia lived there too.

And I didn't expect the disappointment. I volunteered thinking I'd be part of an effort that made a noticeable difference. We did celebrate some small victories. But what I noticed most was corruption winding through every layer of Afghan society, crisscrossed by a growing barricade of U.S. red tape. If we couldn't make progress, the danger and paranoia were for nothing. How silly I'd been to think we could change the world one schoolhouse, one medical clinic, at a time.

I didn't want to concern my mom and dad with my negativity, so while hints would leak into phone conversations—a grumble, a stifled sob—I quickly learned to keep my feelings to myself. My family was worried enough.

Surely my problem hadn't begun on March 21, 2010, when I got back home, where everything was supposed to get better.

Or had it?

The next section on the questionnaire asks me to rate different problems in terms of their seriousness.

Have you experienced loss of interest in pleasurable activities?

I mark "extreme problem." Again it looks melodramatic. Nearly every night I get takeout from the same place. I'm too tired to cook and too antisocial to spend any more time in a restaurant than it takes to pay for my barbecue-pork combo plate. Before I deployed, I organized potlucks and karaoke nights for my friends. Now I just want to be alone.

Sleeping difficulty?

Extreme problem. I could probably nap here in this pink upholstered chair, but at night I turn off the TV and am plunged into an unsettling peace—no helicopters, no rumbling armored vehicles, no chatting smokers on break.

Occupational problems?

Moderate problem. Back at my desk in Florida, I stare at my computer, trying to care about retirement ceremonies and community briefings. Everything seems so trivial. And there's the fear that maybe I am not actually changing the world for the better; maybe I'm making it worse. What if the things I write and say send a ripple? And what if people get caught in that ripple? What if people die? I never thought of my job as life and death, but what if it is?

Then the form lists a series of questions I recognize to be a screening for post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm thankful every day that I didn't "witness or experience an event that involved threatened or actual serious injury or death." The people who did are justified in being here, asking for help. Me...I mostly sat at a desk.

Do you belong to any groups or organizations that are supportive and helpful to you?

"I used to go to church," I write. But I'm not on good terms with God right now. I think of the young pregnant Afghan woman found dead after a special ops mission. I think of two friends who died when their aircraft crashed not long after I got home. I think of an officer on my team, whose wife was also deployed. Why would God bring them back safely only to desert her during a car accident weeks later?

The author before a mission in Afghanistan in 2009... (Photo: Lauren Kay Johnson)

I've reached the final question on the form: How do you think we can help you with your current problem?

"Tell me I'm not crazy," I want to say.

I write, "Help me learn effective coping mechanisms."

I sign the form and walk it over to the window. Back in my chair, I pick nervously at my fingernails. The weather comes on the news; it's hot. I shiver.

Then, "Lieutenant Johnson?"

I look up to find a dark-haired middle-aged woman propping the door open with her sandal.

I wasn't expecting a civilian.

"Hi, I'm Phyllis," she says, with a friendly smile, not the dip-stained snarl of the drill sergeant I'd imagined.

Her handshake is firm and reassuring. She leads me down a sterile hallway, while my mind tries desperately to steer me back in the other direction, out the clinic door and into the summer heat. But my feet keep moving.

Healing didn't come that day. It's a process I'm still going through. I was eventually diagnosed with chronic adjustment disorder—sort of like PTSD lite. I learned to chip away at the barriers I'd built around my emotions—barriers I'd needed in Afghanistan but that made it impossible to be myself in "normal" life. I started talking, then writing, about my experiences.

At a writing conference a year later, I met a former Army infantryman and fellow Afghanistan vet who wrote and lectured about his life in the military. In a dark, seedy bar, over pints of Goose Island 312, we swapped the basics: time in service, deployment dates and locations. Then we swapped manuscripts. In his poetry I saw myself so vividly that it frightened me. Here was someone who had been on this journey and come out OK—beyond OK: He lectured about that journey to help others understand. In him I saw what I wanted to be. At 28, for the first time in my adult life, I had direction.

I'm still reconciling the old and new versions of myself, but I've made peace with both of them. That guy in the bar is now my fiancé. And while I'll always be a veteran, I'm also a graduate student, a writer, a soldier advocate, a triathlete, a doting mother to two cats, an expert chocolate chip cookie baker. A woman.

And, at least much of the time, I'm happy—mostly because I've given myself permission to be. I don't yet feel settled. But I know that being unsettled is OK. I know that I'm OK.

Lauren Kay Johnson is getting her M.F.A. at Emerson College in Boston, where she's writing her memoir. She'll soon be Lauren Kay Halloran—she and Colin will marry in July 2014. Want to see your story here next year? Go to glamour.com/win.